Quotes About Belief

When you're a kid, you have these big ideas and these big dreams to make a change, or maybe you feel like you can't make a difference.

The emotional appeal of a conspiracy theory is in its simplicity. It explains away complex phenomena, accounts for chance and accidents, offers the believer the satisfying sense of having special, privileged access to the truth.

Reagan called on Americans to unify not around blood and soil but around the Constitution: "As long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours.

It is an argument for moral equivalence, an argument that undermines faith, hope, and the belief that we can live up to the language of our Constitution.

Allegiance to a belief system can have deep, non-rational roots

Lenin's vision of labor camps as a special form of punishment for a particular sort of bourgeois "enemy" sat well with his other beliefs about crime and criminals. On the one hand, the first Soviet leader felt ambivalent about the jailing and punishment of traditional criminals—thieves, pickpockets, murderers—whom he perceived as potential allies.

El atractivo emocional de una teoría conspiranoica reside en su simplicidad. Explica fenómenos complejos, da razón del azar y los accidentes, ofrece al creyente la satisfactoria sensación de tener un acceso especial y privilegiado a la verdad. Para quienes se convierten en guardianes del Estado unipartidista, la repetición de esas teorías conspiranoicas también trae otra recompensa: el poder.

Others throw their children into the Volga, preferring to see them drown rather than be brought up in the communist faith, which they believe is an anti-Christ doctrine

In the former Soviet Union in the years following 1989, nationalism was still popularly believed to be progressive; nationalist leaders were still believed, at least in the beginning, to speak for the many people whose voices had been suppressed in the past.

You always believed we could survive in the outside world. I'm doing everything I can to give at least some of us a chance of not only surviving but truly living.

Whether it was true or not, it eased his heart to think there was something beyond the physical plane, something that felt benevolent toward humans, because the gods knew there wasn't much on the physical plane that felt benevolent toward them.

Gods above and below

It's easier to believe something if someone else thinks the same thing.

On the other hand, he firmly believed that ignorance was bullshit, not bliss.

Let's assume that we have a set number of days to indent the world with our beliefs, to find and create the beauty that only a finite existence allows for, to wrestle with the question of purpose and wrestle with our answers. (Jonathan Safran Foer, novelist)

The world no longer let me Love, My hope and Treasure lies Above.

After a short time I changed my condition and was married, and came into this country, where I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose. But after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined the church at Boston.

In the first place, I don't believe you,' answered I;: 'in the second, if you will be such a fool, I can't hinder it.

What shall I do, if all my love, My hopes, my toil, are cast away, And if there be no God above, To hear and bless me when I pray?

We are slaves to the gods. Whatever gods are.

My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

My mother forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

Where does unbelief begin? / When I was young // there were degrees of certainty. / I could say, Yes I know that I have two hands. / Then one day I awakened on a planet of people whose hands / occasionally disappear–

All lovers believe they are inventing love.